


This Could Work In Our Favor

by alcibiades



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: I'm very sorry, M/M, sort of cracky, this is not the sequel to Late To Settle you all were hoping for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-21
Updated: 2014-06-21
Packaged: 2018-02-05 13:31:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1820182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alcibiades/pseuds/alcibiades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
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            </blockquote>





	This Could Work In Our Favor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mr-finch (soubriquet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/gifts).



> Written in about an hour and un-beta'd. You have been warned.

"You're telling me that you didn't book a room," Arthur repeated, looking at Eames incredulously.

The entire job was centered around the fact that a normally-reclusive woman was emerging from a shell of secrecy and seclusion for her daughter's wedding. A wedding which took place at an exclusive island resort. Everyone else had booked a room. Everyone else.

"I thought you were taking care of all that," Eames replied petulantly.

 _Jesus christ,_ thought Arthur. "All right, my room has a king." (Never mind that he had specifically booked a room with a king-sized bed hoping that he'd be able to get the restful sleep he'd been fruitlessly chasing since a job in Auckland seven months ago. Just never mind.) "We can share."

"How magnanimous of you," muttered Eames, following Arthur toward the elevator.

+

This turned out to be a very bad idea, at least for Arthur's sanity's sake. As fate would have it, Eames not only sweated like a pig and somehow managed to raise the ambient temperature of the room by about five degrees through sheer body heat, but also had incredibly foul morning breath. Probably because he didn't floss - at least, he hadn't the night before, despite having time to give Arthur an incredibly pointed look when he noticed the room's single bed, and also to stand far too close to Arthur while Arthur followed his own nighttime oral hygiene routine.

He also snored.

Arthur rolled over for the umpteenth time and mashed his palm against Eames's face, but this time he could already see the sun rising and his phone told him it was five-thirty in the morning, which was only half an hour before his alarm was set to go off anyway. He declared defeat and rolled out of the bed, watching with not even the slightest hint of bemusement as Eames's body immediately and unconsciously filled the space he'd just vacated.

An hour later he was having a post-shower shave and Eames was still asleep in a puddle of his own, doubtless gingivitis-ridden, drool. After dressing for the day, he reached out with one finger and planted it firmly in the center of Eames's back. "You're going to be more than fashionably late if you don't get up now," he said, hoping Eames would take the suggestion and have time to shower before they all met for the morning.

Eames rolled over and blinked at him, rubbing his knuckles into his eyes. Arthur took that as a good sign and went down to seek coffee.

+

Something strange happened during the meeting that morning. Ariadne was normally devastatingly unsubtle about everything, and her glances between Arthur and Eames were no exception. She kept smiling her 'I think I know somebody's secret' smile, which Arthur generally found incredibly irritating, except that in this case, it seemed to come with her being…nicer than normal. Much nicer.

Arthur glanced sidelong at Eames, who returned his glance with a raised eyebrow after a moment. Arthur shrugged. _This could work in our favor,_ he thought.

+

"Service elevator," Eames hissed, yanking Arthur out of the mark's way and through a pair of unmarked doors, which he pulled shut tight behind them. Except it was very dark, and when Arthur managed to locate a light source, he turned it on to discover that they were not, in fact, in a service elevator.

"This is a closet," he sighed, trying the door handle and finding that it had locked behind them. Of course he couldn't have been caught with Ariadne, who would certainly have the hotel's plans memorized by now and would have managed to avoid this entire situation. No, instead, he was trapped in a closet with Eames, who smelled very strongly of piña colada and aftershave and was dressed as if a Tommy Bahama had exploded all over him, complete with Panama hat. Arthur felt he could only be grateful that there was no literal swordfish motif on anything.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket. One bar. When he tried to text Ariadne to come get them, the "sending" bar filled rapidly to about 80% before remaining there seemingly in perpetuity. 

"At least she didn't see us," Eames said with a shrug, starting to go through the pockets of the jackets hanging in the closet. Arthur glanced at the doors to see if he might be able to get them off the hinges, but it was likely that with the door latched shut they wouldn't get anywhere even if they did. He also didn't have enough room to aim a firm kick at the handle, and was fairly certain that neither one nor both of them would have the body weight necessary to break the doors down otherwise.

"Did I ever tell you about Guam?" Eames asked, rifling through someone's belongings. "No, I don't think I did."

"No, you didn't," Arthur replied, leaning against the door and staring at the 80%-full "Sending" bar on his phone.

Forty minutes later, Eames was about halfway through his story when the message finally sent and Ariadne came barreling down to open the door. "You guys," she said, her expression clearly aiming for "scandalized" and falling short, "There are easier ways to get some private time, you know."

It was very difficult for Arthur not to roll his eyes.

+

The real problem with Eames was that roughly eighty to eighty-five percent of his faults were balanced out by his good qualities, Arthur thought, watching Eames watch the wedding guests arrive from where they were seated in the hotel restaurant. He was good-looking and undeniably (as much as things like getting locked in closets and forgetting to book rooms would suggest otherwise) very smart. If he was interested and invested in a thing, he became one of the most valuable assets that you could have. He just wasn't very trustworthy.

Arthur was not a person who found many people trustworthy to begin with - there were varying degrees to which people were privy to any real facts about Arthur, and it was perhaps telling that Eames, who had double-crossed and competed with Arthur more times than could probably be considered friendly in their line of work, knew more about him than Ariadne, whose loyalty Arthur had no reason whatsoever to doubt. The fact that Eames kept coming back - or that Arthur kept knowing where he had gone - said more about their relationship than any objective scale of Eames's trustworthiness. 

But he still didn't quite measure up, somehow - or maybe that was just Arthur being paranoid. He had noticed lately that he was subject to these bouts of melancholic rumination whenever Eames was around. He remained uncertain whether this had to do with the stormy blue-grey of Eames's eyes, the cowlick at the back of his head, the breadth of his shoulders and the way he gripped Arthur's hand and smiled when they met at the beginning of each job, or whether it simply had to do with the inverse ratio of time spent with Eames to amount of sleep gotten by Arthur.

"Oh my god, Stephen! It's been such a long time!" called out a voice from across the lobby. Arthur realized with alarm that it was directed at their table - or rather, at Eames. He sat bolt upright, immediately trying to find a point of exit and then schooling himself back to neutrality as he realized there was none. "I didn't even know if you would have gotten our invitation - and I know it seems strange to invite your ex to your wedding, but I just thought -- we had such a lovely time together, and I really wanted you to meet Cecelia." 

The fiancée of the mark's daughter swept over to their table, all dark hair, charm, and smiles. Eames got up to greet her and Arthur stood too, albeit a bit stiffly. "Alekhya, it's lovely to see you," said Eames, leaning forward to kiss her cheek. "What can I say, we were in the area and the invitation was too tempting to refuse. I'm so happy for you, congratulations!"

"I'm so glad you could come!" Alekhya laughed, tossing her hair back. "Aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?"

"Of course; how rude of me" Eames said, putting his arm around Arthur. "This is Tobias, don't call him Toby. We've been together for about a year and a half."

"Isn't it funny how this turned out!" Alekhya said. "You dating a man, I'm getting married to a woman, who would have thought it. And what do you do, Tobias?"

"I'm an actuary," Arthur said flatly, reaching out to shake Alekhya's hand, as she laughed again.

"Wow, that seems so -- I'm sorry, but when I knew Stephen, he was a bit of a bad boy, I suppose you could say." She giggled, waving her hand as if to dispel a rumor like smoke, and Arthur wondered exactly what pretense it was under which Eames knew her. 

"I thought you were in real estate, honey," he said to Eames, miming surprise, and before Eames could respond, Alekhya was being called back to the lobby by her family. She waved and promised to catch up with Eames later, and told them that she was so happy they both could come.

Arthur sat down. He finished his coffee before he said anything, and Eames was wise enough to be silent as well. 

"So it seems we're at your ex's wedding," he said. Maybe beneath the simmering irritation there was a faint bit of amusement at how alarmed Eames looked.

"I should have read those personnel files more thoroughly," Eames said, resting his head heavily in both hands.

"Yes," Arthur agreed. "You should have."

+

Somehow, _somehow_ , the job went off without a hitch. Arthur would have said he had no idea how, except that its success was owed in no small part, as it usually was, to his diligence and adaptability. Eames probably would have said that was just Arthur's incredible ego getting out of hand, except that he was the one who failed to realize it was his own ex's wedding, so he was uncharacteristically silent on that front for the rest of the job.

Ariadne just seemed to think that Eames was being nice to Arthur because they were dating. At the end of it all, Arthur thought about disabusing her of that mistaken notion, but instead decided that he preferred this kinder, gentler version of Ariadne, and, in the immortal words of the Beatles, let it be.

She redirected her zealous, spiteful ire onto Cobb. "If you were going to extract from Cobb, what scenario would you use?" she asked Arthur, eating one of the seven (!) olives she had requested in her martini as they sat on a rooftop patio in Los Angeles.

Arthur decided he probably should have seen this coming. "Hot single dad hires broke babysitter," he said without hesitation, rolling up his sleeves. 

"Whoa, really?" Ariadne actually looked a little scandalized. Amazing that a straightforward porno scenario would manage to flabbergast a young woman with such a sizable collection of Bad Dragon merchandise, Arthur mused, though he was sure she didn't know he was aware of that. She needed to work harder on keeping her web presence under wraps. Anyone could be using that information against her.

"Oh yeah," he said. "Trust me, I've known him for a long time. That would be the one. He'd open up like a matryoshka doll. Or an onion. All the layers would just peel away."

"I think onion might be the more apt metaphor." Ariadne sipped contemplatively. "Actually, no, you know what, that's really not why I'm here, though. I have this job in Siberia, and I want you and Eames for it."

Arthur arched his eyebrows. "Why are you asking me about Eames?" 

Ariadne rolled her eyes hard enough to actually make him laugh. 

+

The rental car broke down in the middle of nowhere - literally in the middle of nowhere. Arthur hadn't seen a road sign for at least half an hour, and he blamed himself for letting Eames navigate. It was about thirty degrees outside and snowing so heavily that it was almost impossible to see. He got out of the car and walked around for about five minutes before determining they weren't going anywhere until the snow let up. "It's spring," he said, feeling less alarmed than Eames looked. "This isn't going to last forever. The car still runs, we can use the heater sparingly until we run out of gas or battery power or both, and we're not going to become hypothermic immediately in slightly-below-freezing weather. Trust me, I'm sure we've both been in worse situations than this and come out on top." The Fischer job, for one, came to mind.

He wiped his face off - the snow that had stuck to him in large flakes had already melted - and looked at Eames in perplexity. "What?"

"I don't want to die here, in Siberia, without having done this," Eames said. He leaned across the seat, took Arthur's damp chin in hand, and kissed him.

His oral hygiene habits, Arthur noted, had distinctly improved.


End file.
